Thirty flights is not enough

Take your eyes and rivet them to the point in the future when Thirty Flights Of Loving will be released. That will be a great day for you. You will give birth to kittens that day and the kittens will serve you small greasy sandwiches on plates that are balanced on their heads.

Thirty Flights is the sequel to the indie game Gravity Bone made by one man developer Brendon Chung a.k.a. Blendo Games (Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher). It is being called a “video game short story” and it’s been developed for the Idle Thumbs Kickstarter project.

For those who, like me, don’t know, Idle Thumbs was a popular video game podcast which stopped airing in 2010 and left its devoted audience emoticonning frowny faces all over the internet I imagine. Now, the game industry careerists who composed Idle Thumbs are raising money to start the podcast again. They’ve already met their goal, but there’s still time to donate the $30 that will earn you a digital download of Gravity Bone’s sequel, Thirty Flights of Loving. Apparently there will be future versions of Thirty Flights and there has been no word on when they’ll come out, what they’ll contain, or how much they’ll cost. However, if you get the Idle Thumbs version you will also get you a special Goldblum Mode that will be unavailable in future versions.

Thirty dollars might seem like a lot of money for a game that, as a short story, will probably be about thirty minutes long. But it’s not. Let me tell you about Gravity Bone.

If you haven’t played Gravity Bone you will never truly understand video games and you are missing out on the only experience in your life. That is not exaggeration. Gravity Bone is more charmingly and adeptly designed than any other game I’ve ever played including itself. Its unique visual style, which is being reprised for Thirty Flights of Loving, combines wonderfully with the game’s implications of a narrative iceberg lurking beneath the watery depths of the immediate exposition. If you don’t want to take my word for it just play it yourself. You play as a spy, it only takes about fifteen minutes, it’s free to download on the Blendo Games website, and it will run on most PCs. It’s worth it; Gravity Bone had such an impact on me that it inspired the title of my personal video game blog Electric Cartilage.

I’m going to go ahead and say that I can tell Thirty Flights of Loving will be a great sequel and I can tell this, not just because it has a name that isn’t Gravity Bone 2, but also, because Brendon Chung has shown in his previous games that he is so fluent in the use of fantastical charm, narrative ambiguity, and atmospheric implication that he must have spent his childhood living in a conversation held by Douglas Adams, Jorge Luis Borges, and Federico Fellini. Make of that what you will. The announcement that Thirty Flights of Loving is being released is wonderful news since, even if you ignore my hyperbole, it will be one of the most wonderful games to come out in years.